Merry Christmas

As I am just about to board the plane to spend the holidays with my family in Germany, I thought I would post a couple of pictures to show you some of the great things our class was up to in these last three weeks. December at Ruth King came and went by so fast that I didn't get the chance to post on my blog every week. There was just too much to do .... my apologies! But I do hope that you enjoy this quick review of some of the highlights in our classroom.

As you can see from the picture above, the bottom of our beautiful classroom tree filled up very quickly with gifts and everyone was very excited for our gift exchange on the last day of school. But before that we enjoyed an amazing Winter Concert, where our class was able to showcase its great musical talent! Wow, what a wonderful show it was and I was very proud of our boys and girls, who demonstrated good role modelling to our younger students, even though they were quite excited and a little nervous themselves.

Spirit Days are always a hit in our classroom and we all were very excited about Pajama Day with an afternoon movie in the gym.

We also had two days of snow, even though some of us would have liked to see some more, we enjoyed the distraction. Lots of singing in the classroom and several art activities made the days go by very quickly.

We spent quite a bit of time with our little buddies in Ms. Walker's class this month, but my favourite one was definitely the day we went swimming to the Commonwealth Pool and then finished the day with a Christmas Party with our little buddies! It was so much fun and again, everyone demonstrated some good leadership and mentoring of our younger friends. Then finally the much anticipated last day of school arrived and all of the Division 4 students participated in a very special classroom meeting. We discussed the true meaning of giving, generosity and kindness. Then we proceeded to open the gifts from our Secret Santa...one by one each student opened their gift and the class watched in a supportive and very caring manner. It was very touching to see that everyone put a lot of thought into their gift and it was quite amazing to see some of the reactions of the recipients, who were so delighted and grateful. There was definitely a little bit of magic in the air...see for yourselves:





With these beautiful smiles I will sign off, wishing you and your loved ones all the best for the holiday season! Merry Christmas and I will see you in 2014!

Of Cowboys and Elves



This has been a very eventful couple of weeks at Ruth King and all of the boys and girls in Division 4 have been working hard to finish the first term with a bang! Report cards were sent home on Friday, and we are now onto Term 2 with only three weeks left until the winter break.
As you can see, we enjoyed Cowboy/Cowgirl Day on Wednesday and celebrated the final Movember Wednesday. A big shout out to Ms. Walker and her team of leaders for an incredible successful fundraising towards men's' health. More than $200 were raised!!

In Math, we continue with our multiplication timestable and we have now learned x1, x2, x3, x4, x5, x10 and all of the doubles. The students enjoy the daily quick mental math drills in the morning and improved on their written output as well. Continue to quiz your child in the car or while cooking dinner. Games are a wonderful way to integrate math in your daily lives and at the same time connect with your child. This month, our class learns Yahtzee, an excellent game to practice addition and multiplication. Every month I will introduce another math game to the kids. Stay tuned and ask your son or daughter to teach you the game of the month!! Please note that there will be a math quiz on Wednesday, December 4.

In Science, students were able to share what they had learned about clouds at last week's science quiz. By the way, I invited a fantastic guest speaker to our classroom in January, who will talk to the children about forecasting and weather reporting on television. Some of us might even be on TV!! More about it in my next blog!
It was wonderful to meet so many families at our parent teacher night last week. I enjoyed all of the conversations and feel so lucky to work in such a great community with so many caring and supportive families. If I haven't met you yet, please feel free to drop by or send me an email, so we can set up a time to meet.
I will leave you with some very creative elves to ring in the holiday season! Happy December! Enjoy spending time with your family, friends and most importantly... your children! Don't let the pressures of Christmas overwhelm you! Take care.